Lifeworld Analysis

Abstract

We argue that the analysis of agent/environment interactions should be extended to include the conventions and invariants maintained by agents throughout their activity. We refer to this thicker notion of environment as a lifeworld and present a partial set of formal tools for describing structures of lifeworlds and the ways in which they computationally simplify activity. As one speci c example, we apply the tools to the analysis of the Toast system and show how versions of the system with very di erent control structures in fact implement a common control structure together with di erent conventions for encoding task state in the positions or states of objects in the environment.

From action to discourse: The bridging function of gestures

“…At the same time, the material setting put constraints on how gestures could be understood, because in communication, gestures and aspect of the ground to be made salient have to coincide. These constraints by the material setting therefore operated in ways similar to those that determined the next moves in the actions of shortorder cooks and therefore constitute a form of knowing that does not need to be mentally represented (Agre & Horswill, 1997).…”

Migrant worker children: Conceptions of homelessness and implications for education

“…This situatedness leads to embedded relationships between human beings, their resources, perceptions, and environment. In fields such as sociology and anthropology as well as education, social work, and nursing -fields concerned with understanding people and cultures -lifeworld is a powerful construct because it emphasizes the contextually dependent relationships between physical and social settings and resources (Agre & Horswill, 1997;Dahiberg & Drew, 1997;Roth, 2000;Roth & McRobbie, 1999;Walters, 1995). The idea of lifeworld suggests that, to be helpful, social services such as education need to be situationally conditional and responsive.…”

Appraisal for a Character-Based Story-World

“…To analyse the actually possible and necessary behaviours we use the concept of a lifeworld [1], to enrich the notion of an environment by focusing on the patterned ways in which a physical environment is functionally meaningful within some activity [1, p.114]. Such a lifeworld analysis can be leveraged not only to restrict the complexity of the agent-environment interactions (as necessary in a simulation), but also to identify relevant regularities during design.…”

“…In [1], the authors identify the lifeworld with abstract locatedness and functionally significant relationships grounded in the physical environment. Analogously, social lifeworld analysis considers the potential for inter -action with respect to loci of control at the macro level (e.g., power and status [22]) as well as indirect access to (second and higher level) resources (e.g., [2]).…”